LINUX Unplugged - 359: Death of the Mac

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

Why we think Apple just handed market share to Desktop Linux, and why you can kiss running Linux on the Mac goodbye forever. Special Guests: Drew DeVore and Neal Gompa.

Wes, you never have to worry about again. They have thrown machine learning at recipes. At least I think. What did you find here? Well, you already trust machine learning to drive you around, right, Chris? So why not let it cook for you with some generated recipes using TensorFlow and a recurrent neural network? How does cream soda with onion sound? Mmm, about as good as the orange club tea sandwich with cookies. onion sound. Mmm, about as good as the orange club tea sandwich with cookies. Yeah, these are pretty wild. It's a TensorFlow model applied to a whole bunch of recipes, and then why not see what it comes up with?

Now, they do warn here in the readme it's all open source, of course, that these recipes are for research purposes and not for actual cooking. Maybe you'd make this one? I don't know, Wes. Let's cook this up before the show and see if we like it. Mushrooms with lentil, stewed with shallots and tomatoes. It sounds really good. It has a lot of garlic, so what could go wrong?

Hello, friends, and welcome to your weekly Linux talk show that has yet to be replaced by machine learning. My name is Chris. My name is Wes, and I have high hopes for the machines. They have a lot of sample data to review, because this is episode 359, and this week we have so much to get into, including the death of Mac OS X and how this will affect the Linux desktop. But before we get there, I want to say time-appropriate

greetings to our powerful assembly of Mumble Room, lug members of power. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Good evening. I need to work on that. You know, I need to work on that name. It's just, it was like a beta, you know, just a beta. But we have a good crew in there. Lots of people in the quiet listening as well. We have 23 members there today, some familiar faces and some new ones as well. So thank you, everybody, for joining us.

Well, let's get into the Unplugged program because, yeah, we have a lot to discuss. First of all, some big community news, some like things are changing kind of community news for the Linux hardware future landscape. And then we'll talk about how Apple switching to ARM will impact Linux. We don't do this too often, but I think in today's world, you have to acknowledge the entire marketplace and ecosystem and how that will also affect us Linux users. And we'll also talk a little bit more about the longer term picture there. Plus, we have some pics, maybe some feedback and all that more. So, Wes, what do you say? You want to just start right in with the community news?

Yes, please. See, I wanted you to argue. I thought for sure you'd argue with me a little bit. Now, you know, I love community news. That's true. You do. It's all kind of on topic this week because it just seems to be the way the industry is trending. There is an arm based Japanese supercomputer that is now the world's. It's now is it the fastest or one of the fastest? The part that I cared about, of course, is that it runs Linux, but it is a Japanese supercomputer that has taken the top spot in the biannual top 500 supercomputer speed ranking. Yeah, and it's the first time a computer based on

ARM has done so. It's Fujitsu's 48-core A64FX system on a chip that's powering the whole thing, and it's co-developed by Ryken and Fujitsu. The computer placed in the top 500 high-performance results, with performance numbers like 415.5 petaflops. That's 2.8 times as fast as IBM's Summit, which is number two. That 48-core chip, huh? Wow. So right now it's number crunching for COVID-19, which is pretty cool. Also, Fujitsu's 48-core ARM chip here. This is one of those things we don't talk a lot about, but Fujitsu is kind of a wild duck out there. You know, they're doing their own thing.

They're making these super cool systems. But because they don't really fit into the realm of everyday life, they don't get talked a lot about. But this is a nice reminder that there's some killer Linux systems out there from Fujitsu. Yeah, super powerful. You know, back in the day, I had access to this neat flatbed printer they make, so clearly they're in the hardware game at serious levels in all kinds of spaces. It's also kind of interesting here where normally it's just been the Americans and the Chinese sort of competing for fastest supercomputer out there. This is the first time that Japan's made the list in the past nine years, but obviously they came to play and with an ARM system.

I think we'll continue to talk about today, and that's a big sign of things to come. Yeah, it does seem very fitting. Debian also has some big news in the ARM department. Ampere has partnered with Debian to support their hardware infrastructure and has donated three of their high-performance ARM64 boxes. These Lenovo ThinkSystem HR330A servers contain Ampere's Emeg CPU with an ARMv8 64-bit processor specifically designed for cloud servers. for cloud servers. They've got a sweet 256 gigs of RAM, dual 960 gig SSDs, and a 25 gig dual port NIC on there, so these are no slouch. The donated servers have been deployed over at the University

of British Columbia, just up north from the studio here, and the Debian System Administrators Group has already configured them to run ARM64, ARM HardFloat, and ARM EL Build Daemons. And all of that stuff is good news because they're replacing previous build servers that were running on basically development-grade boards. And Ampere's goal here really is just to get better software developed for their cloud-built, they say, the future of cloud and edge computing for these very specific systems they have, where they're trying to build features in at the processor level for this type of work, they need the software support there. They need the open-source software support there. And they seem to be big fans of the Debian project reading through their release announcements.

So it's kind of a win-win. I mean, come on. Who's not a big fan of Debian? The Dev1 folks? Yeah, I suppose so. But you're right. I mean, you know, the more these are out there, the easier it is to build on these platforms.

And that is maybe one of the things that can be difficult about the ARM world is you got to build for the platform you're actually going to try to run on. Well, that's better for everyone, especially considering the huge number of packages in the Debian repos. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I've been really enjoying the Pinebook Pro over the two weeks now that I've been using it. I do feel like there's been a handful of packages I wish I could have gotten installed that are just not yet built for the ARM chipset. And I think it's not really, you know, I'm trying to think it's mostly like commercial applications that maybe even if the desktop client is open source,

it's connecting to their proprietary service. I think that's probably the ones that haven't worked the most. And it's been frustrating, so I'd love to see this grow. But watching all this ARM news and reading it from an ARM laptop has been a bit of a mind job for me because the Pinebook Pro is already there, right? The Rock Pro 64, it's already a competitive mobile ARM platform. And we have the Pine phone in studio, and it was much better built than we expected right out of the box. That's for sure.

So in a big way for open source and free software, it feels like ARM is now just an implementation detail that hasn't just really gotten wide enough adoption yet for all of the software edge cases to be worked out. But it just seems inevitable at this point. Yeah, I mean, these are cloud-enabled servers. AWS, Amazon, they've been working hard on their Graviton chips too. So there's going to be some really nice, in terms of performance and cost, instances available over there before long.

And unless you've got x86 workloads that you really need because of some optimization or some vendor library that you don't have control over, if it's all just open source stuff that you can rebuild, recompile, or already just runs on top of Python or the JVM, why not run on ARM? And I think, too, about the Raspberry Pi. So the Raspberry Pi 4, 8 gigs of RAM, pretty good processor now. Imagine what that thing's going to be like when it's the Raspberry Pi 7, Raspberry Pi 8, maybe even the Raspberry Pi 10. It's going to be a very capable little board. It's going to probably put what we would consider a standard desktop system to shame right today. And that's just a trend that just seems to continue. So it's coming,

Wes. You know, and the Pine book has really made me kind of appreciate it because the battery life is fantastic. And I've been on this trip. I'm still on my trip. I'm I'm actually in Texas. In fact, not only am I in Austin, Texas right now, but I am christening my cousin's studio that he had built down here at his office in Austin with the very first broadcast right here on Linux Unplugged in his new studio space. We're still dialing it all in. Doesn't have all the furniture in here yet. Doesn't even have all the final sound treatment installed yet. But it is pretty, pretty cool. I'm going to lean back so you can enjoy the space.

Are you ready, Wes? I'm going to. Oh, please. It's pretty, pretty great. You see, it drops off. You hear it. I mean, it drops off pretty good, doesn't it? I mean, really.

It's got some good bones in that studio. So pretty cool to do the first broadcast right here. So we're battle testing it for him. And I might give him a few pointers afterwards. My first tip was put a rug down. You got to put a rug down. So he went this morning to Lowe's and got a rug. I mean, you just want as much stuff to absorb that sound as you can, right? Yep. So pretty great. So I'll probably be down here for the rest of the week. And I'll probably start the long trek back to the Pacific Northwest, maybe via Montana first.

I just like how wherever you go, you just end up setting up studios, you know? So wherever you stop, you're like, hey, can I just, I'll just rent an extra room and I've got all this foam paneling. If you guys could put that up for me. I mean, that's, you know, I fill all the RV up with foam, right? Just for these very purposes right here. It's like a ball pit, but you're just floating on foam. So I'm looking at my route back, you know, I'm looking at that and I'm thinking I'm going to avoid New Mexico as much as possible because I think I lost five years of life on my RV. And in fact, I even have a slight oil leak from my fill pan, from my drain, just my drain plugs leaking. But I think it's because the New Mexico roads were so bad that it just shook Lady Jupes

down to her core. So I got to do like a little bit of maintenance on her before we head home. And I think I'll probably go up through Colorado and Wyoming through Montana and then through Idaho back to Washington. So take a nice long trek, you know, just work from the road. I got the kids with me. I got the wife, got the dog, got the my five. So, yeah, why yeah, why not enjoy the experience of the West? Got multiple MiFis, Wes. Multiple. Yeah, that's true. You're a pro here.

And so not only have I been rocking the Pinebook Pro as sort of my, I just want one thing that I just plug in and keep charged and don't have to worry about it while I'm on the go. Pinebook Pro has been great for that. But I gotta say, so much respect for the Raspberry Pi 4. People talk about, oh, it runs a little hot. You know, that was a big discussion for the Raspberry Pi 4. You better get a heat sink for it. And people are getting heat sinks with active fans and just going all out to try to keep the temperature down.

Last night, the booth that I run the Raspberry Pis in along with my Wi-Fi and my Switch, and I don't do this, don't do what Chris does, and where I have my hard drives that are all formatted in ButterFS, that space got to 99 degrees last night. Oh! Now that's Fahrenheit, right? Yeah, otherwise they'd be melting. They just kept going.

You know, like I'm streaming Plex to the TV, the Wi-Fi. Everything's just working. They just, they get hot and I don't have them under intense load. If I really had them crunchy, they'd probably start, you know, having issues. And I vent them when I get home and I realize how hot it is. I like the idea of you, because it's in a seat in your RV, like the idea that you have to prioritize, well, am I going to sit down and relax or am I going to vent my computers? No, sorry, son.

You can't sit there. The pies are vented. That actually happened. Yep. I got to vent the computers. I want to get to it before they all fry, you know, because what I'm really worried about going isn't now the Raspberry Pi so much. I'm worried about the little power bricks for like the switch or the Wi-Fi access point. I'm worried about that melting or popping, you know. So that's my concern at this point, because the

Raspberry Pi will thermal throttle, you know, it'll even, you know, it'll shut itself down. So that is the big concern. That's the nice part about this, you know, solid state life. There's not a whole lot of moving parts, so it's going to fail. It'll get there eventually. And actually, the way I realize it's kind of great, I mean, it's not a huge thing, but I Velcroed everything in there and that, or I should say that loop and hook. It's not Velcro, it's loop and hook. No, come on. That's a brand name. But that creates an airspace under the hard drives and under the Raspberry Pis, so there's a little bit more room for air to move when I do ventilate, so that helps. But I'm pretty impressed with how well it's all worked. LadyJupes is so integrated now with the Linux systems and the automations that it's pretty critical.

So if anything happens, it makes things very, very, very inconvenient. But it's all awesome so far. You drop back like 50 years if that little booth goes down. Yes. Yeah, really. The one thing I will note for folks, because I do hear from people that are building these into into their campers for the summer and stuff like that. All of these systems expect your home to remain in one place. So anything that uses location for your automations or security stuff, or like for me, like my cameras,

the way I have my home assistant system work is when I leave an area, the cameras come on certain. If no one's been home for a while, lights start to turn off the head, the heaters go to standby mode, like things sort of shut down over time when no one's home. And then when people arrive, these things reverse themselves. Or when the sun sets or the sun rises, other things automatically trigger in the RV to maintain things.

And the first couple of days, I didn't really notice because I was pretty close to home on the road. But by the time I got to Utah, I noticed that something wasn't quite right with the lights and everything. And then like things just didn't seem like they were working quite right or something wasn't in the state I expected it to be in. And it took me a solid maybe three or four days into the trip before I realized, oh, yeah, every couple of days now I got to go in there into Home Assistant and the other systems and update the location information because they just expect your house to never move. Oh, yeah.

I mean, I don't move around as much as you, but I move around more than I'd like. And I've noticed that, too. Just you change a little bit and all your systems have already learned like, oh, these are the nearby cell towers. Here's where you are approximately. You don't tell them any of that. And I don't know how to necessarily tell Google that I've moved and that my directions shouldn't go to the old place.

Yeah, it's very tricky on Google Home. And it's not even worth it on the ecosystems. They just are such a pain in the butt. It's not even worth updating them. And so you just basically get weather and information from your home location. The plus side of that is no one knows where you are. That is true. That is kind of great, actually. But speaking of Google, there is more features coming to Chrome because, you know, we've been talking about how Chrome needs more stuff. And

more specifically, it's getting a feature that iPhone users and Mac users seem to enjoy, AirDrop. And they're calling it Nearby Share, and it will expand Android devices, Windows, Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS, all thanks to its Chrome integration. Yeah, in other words, Nearby Share will be part of the Google Chrome browser feature lineup. One more feature for this browser that just keeps growing. Taking care of the whole sharing thing regardless of the platform.

And hey, that is kind of nice, right? Chrome runs basically everywhere these days. According to a recent discovery shared by Dinson Francis of Chrome Story, the feature has actually already been implemented in the Canary version of Google Chrome. So if you're running that, maybe you've seen it show up on a system near you, that means it's currently in a rather advanced testing phase and probably we'll all get to play with it before too long. I mean, this is so late. I don't understand, like, what a handy feature to have just observing folks in the iOS ecosystem. I mean, this is a pretty basic technology, right? I didn't realize how popular AirDrop was until I started visiting offices again. And people would just use AirDrop for just, hey, I updated the presentation. Before you go live,

here's the presentation for this, for one group I'm thinking of. Or here, we're at the meeting, would anybody else like a copy of this doc? And they just AirDrop it to everybody. And to me, that always seemed like, well, that's what file shares are for, or God forbid, even an email attachment. But much like many other things in the corporate world changed since the last time I was in it, airdrop seems to have been fairly adopted. And I note that Microsoft integrated a very similar feature with the same name, nearby share, that's awkward, into Windows 10 Build 1803. Now, technically, Chris, that's Nearby Sharing on the Microsoft side. Totally different. Right. My bad. And I wonder if Google's is going to be like Chromecast, where there's some cloud

involved sometimes in the actual transmission of the data or sometimes it's just for session negotiation or will it be over the LAN because that seems to be the primary advantage of AirDrop and the equivalence that we've tested on the Linux desktop is it's LAN to LAN. Yeah, right. There's totally times where you just don't have access to the cloud for whatever reason, even if you wish that you did. And these features can just, you know, keep working without a hitch. That's a lot of value. When I'm driving and there's areas where maybe there's a tiny bit of cell signal or there's no signal. So, so much of modern technology is just worthless, just worthless. And I just don't want any more of that. Like, there's no reason that a cloud server needs to be involved for me to discover something on my LAN and send something to an IP address on my LAN. plane where I had an e-book downloaded on my laptop, but I needed it on my phone. But, you know, I didn't, I hadn't paid for the internet, of course, on the plane. Because it's like ridiculous. Yeah. And it just like, I, despite all of the weird hacks that I tried, I just couldn't get

it to go. And if I'd had this feature that worked offline, it would have taken me two seconds and I would have enjoyed my e-book. Was that before you tried HTTP over DNS? Yeah, I think so. In my more naive days. All right. Well, let's do a little housekeeping here in the pod because we have a few things to talk about. Number one, the LUP-LUG takeover is happening. They now have an autonomous zone in our mumble every Sunday.

They also have established an autonomous zone in our mumble every Sunday. They also have established autonomous zone on the IRC server, irc.geekshed.net, pound, lub, lug. Now, the lug itself takes place every Sunday at noon Pacific. That's the same time we do this here podcast, but it's just on Sunday. It's also somehow they have leveraged their new negotiating position to campaign Angela, Somehow, they have leveraged their new negotiating position to campaign Angela, and they have gotten it on the actual live production calendar. A true victory for the Leplug. So join us every Sunday where we hang out, talk Linux, come up with ideas for the show, and if I don't make it, they plot takeovers of the entire network. So that's fun, too.

All of that is in our Mumble room, the same exact software and server we use for this show. So you get it set up once, you come hang out on a Sunday, and then if you ever have the opportunity to join us on a Tuesday, you can. That's when we record this show, Tuesday live, noon Pacific over at jblive.tv. Also on the calendar. How about that? Huh? Look at us. It's really all Angela.

So thanks to Angela for doing that. jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time. We'd love to see you. If you're hanging out, I just jump in from time to time. I make it for maybe an hour, maybe make it for a couple hours, maybe I make it 45 minutes. It goes while the conversation's going. That's how long and you can just sort of dip in. It's like a beautiful crystal clear Linux stream of fresh conversation. That's what I love about it. It's just, you know, a place that you know is going to be there. Sometimes you can make it, sometimes you can't. So you never know quite who's going to be there, which is partially exciting.

But regardless, you know there's going to be a community of folks interested in talking about Linux and open source. Ready, if you are, on Sunday. A couple other bits of admin for this show. You hear us mention the show notes quite a bit. Linuxunplugged.com slash 359 will be links to stuff we talk about today. That's also where you'll find the contact page link if you'd like to send us an email or recommend something we check out on the show. You can find that there as well. Linuxunplugged.com. And with that, we enter a zone that is truly going to be frustrating for some of you. I warn you, you may be triggered by what happens next on the show.

This week was WWDC. And I don't think we've ever covered one of them ever on this show before, very intentionally. But this year is a little different because it is the death of Mac OS X, and it is the transition of the Apple platform back to an extremely esoteric custom-built system that will undoubtedly be very, very locked down. This is a big moment because it's Apple's custom system on a chip. It's not an x86 processor that's capable of running x86 OSs out of the box right now. It's something brand new. Apple is officially moving to its own silicon chips for Mac hardware.

Calling it a historic day for the Mac, Apple CEO Tim Cook detailed the transition from PowerPC to macOS, the move to Intel chips, before unveiling their plans to use Apple's own ARM-powered silicon chips in the Macs in the near future. The Mac has had three major transitions in its history. The move to PowerPC, the transition to Mac OS X, and the move to Intel. And now it's time for a huge leap forward for the Mac. Because today is the day we're announcing that the Mac is transitioning to our own Apple Silicon. Wow. Oh boy. Now, we don't have all of the details yet,

but what we have so far is a Mac mini with an iPad processor in it, 512 gigabytes of storage, some RAM in there, and it's a development kit. 16 gigs of RAM. And I think this will truly be the end of any opportunity to ever run Linux on a Mac hardware. I really do. I think this is just the end of it natively. You'll be able to virtualize it. We'll get to that. But I think it truly is the end. Now, this is an awkward position for Apple because Linux can't be ignored anymore. In their previous transitions, they didn't have to address it. When they announced x86 Max, it wasn't the elephant in the room. But now it is legitimately part of the real world. It is part of people's development workflow. And it even got a mention in their

keynote. Now, as Craig mentioned, many of our users rely on apps from other environments. So let me bring up a Linux VM in Parallels Desktop. You can see the graphical user interface designed for Linux here. But of course, many developers like to use Linux for hosting servers. So let me dive down to the command line and launch an Apache web server. And now I can simply bring up Safari and browse the website of the server I just launched in the Linux VM. Pretty weird to see Linux demoed on the stage.

Well, it's not really a stage, but on screen at WWDC. Yeah, right there, giant developer event that normally includes mostly just Xcode and some flashy Mac features. Yeah, it's remarkable if any other company gets a mention, let alone a Gnome Shell

Debian 10 demo. That's pretty wild. So what is the open source story on the Mac? Because I think one of the first reactions that people have is, well, Linux already runs great on ARM processors. Right. But something that people have to remember is these are not standard ARM CPUs. These are custom Apple silicon. ARM isn't a CPU. It's not like it's an Intel x86 processor where you could buy something that's x86 compatible that could be from AMD or Intel. There isn't one ARM CPU. And so it's a series of technologies. And there's so much more to it, including graphics, storage controllers, networking. All of that has to be supported by the host operating system.

And I think it's pretty clear that Apple's vision for this is we'll port the open source applications themselves and the rest is up to virtualization. We're also passionate about making sure that open source projects thrive on the Mac, especially if they benefit the larger software developer community and can help accelerating the port of other software packages. So we've already done the initial work for some of the more widely used open source projects to help the community get started. And we'll be publishing patches to them in the next days. They've ported things like Qt, they've ported things like Monofmpeg and others to their arm processors homebrew and that's a big one that stands out and blender even yeah but for the actual linux os itself for that they've updated their hypervisor in mac os and they expect that's how people will run linux on max one area that we have worked on removing kernel extension usage

is for virtualization products. The Mac is the world's best developer platform. Many developer workflows require using tools from different platforms or performing server deployments. To meet these needs, many of you spin up virtual machines running different operating systems or lightweight containers like Docker. And we know that this is critical to your work and important we support these needs. That's why we've been working hard with our partners

to support virtual machines or Macs with Apple Silicon. As you saw in the keynote, we started working with Parallels. And I want to walk you through an early port of Parallels Desktop for Mac running on the Apple hypervisor that's been updated for Apple Silicon. This is running on a prototype Mac with Apple Silicon that supports virtualization. Here we have a fully featured ARM version of Debian Linux running on Parallels Desktop. Remember, this doesn't require any third-party kernel extensions to be installed now. I've installed Swift for Linux and started a new

project with Vapor, a Swift web framework you may be familiar with. So we should be clear here, right, that this is Debian on ARM? Yes. You can run efficient ARM VMs on top of their ARM-based silicon. Exactly. This is Apple supporting Linux VMs that are ARM-based. They have, I believe, taken Beehive from FreeBSD and ported it to macOS and customized it to run enhanced on their silicon. And it's now all in an SDK you can access. So instead of having to make your own custom kernel module, basically, there's just now regular Apple calls to the OS OS that you can say like, hey, I want a new ARM VM. Here's the disk image I want you to use and go at it. Yeah. I mean, it's not unsimilar to how we do it on Linux.

It isn't a complete solution. See where Microsoft, they closed the gap and made a solution around Linux. Apple is essentially offloading this work to Beehive and Parallels, you know, a commercial company to build the front end. to Beehive and Parallels, you know, a commercial company to build the front end. And then they're deprecating the ability to actually run native operating systems on their hardware and saying, well, look, we've ported a bunch of the open source software and we've got this fancy hypervisor that we've stolen from BSD. So what's your problem? I think when you zoom out and look at this, it means the world has one less Unix-like

operating system for the desktop. And it makes Linux the most prominent Unix-like desktop that is now available for general computers. So if I take your point here, it's that Mac OS is, for a while we pretended, and it was, right? The Hackintosh world maybe demonstrates this best. It was a sort of general purpose operating system. Sure, 95% of it ran on Apple hardware, but it was an operating system that could and would support other things. But in theory, the more iOS-like future, macOS 11, I guess, that's going to be even more targeted at custom Apple hardware and isn't

intended anymore if it ever really was for more general purpose things. I don't think it's possible. I think the controller, which you've already seen with the T1 and the T2 that are in the MacBooks with touch bars and later, it's never been supported by Linux. And now they're going to integrate the secure enclave and encryption and all of that into the system that'll never be supported by Linux. They'll never do that. You know, I think that's an interesting aspect here. You know, you touched a little bit on, well, yeah, I mean, Linux already supports like, you know, ARM architectures and stuff. But I think the biggest thing here is they no longer have that Intel chip at the core that,

you know, limits sort of how they're going to customize their board and configure all the other chips running on the system. Now that entire domain is basically in their hands. And so, yeah, it's not new. We already had the whole, you know, the T2 chip, lots of custom hardware and controllers that just Linux didn't support because it was all custom done between the hardware and the software on Apple's side. This is just one bigger step down that road. the software on Apple's side. This is just one bigger step down that road. Yeah, very much. And Drew, I know that you worked, I think, as an Apple genius or a certified Apple tech for a while, ages ago, back when you could put Linux on MacBooks. I'm curious to know your perspective on this. Yeah, I was ACSP and ACT certified for a while working in the MSP world.

and ACT certified for a while working in the MSP world. And one thing that I do want to be flat out about is even though they make the promise that they're going to be porting some open source projects over, I would be hesitant to really put any faith or trust in that because they are so wary of the GPL v3 that they went so far as to roll their own Samba implementation rather than go up to Samba 3. I would not expect for them to really bring out a ton here. It's only going to be things using GPLv2, LGPL, things that they consider to be friendly licenses to them. Things that they consider to be friendly licenses to them.

And while that will cover a large portion of open source products, we're not looking at a case of Apple is suddenly going to be a huge boon to open source on ARM. I just don't think that's going to be the future for us. Yeah, I could see it causing an industry reaction where more players move towards ARM, and that has the net effect of improving open source free software and Linux's support for that platform. I could see it having that sort of knock on domino effect at the bigger picture level. I don't think any direct hardware drivers are going to be contributed by Apple. For a brief moment when they started talking about Linux up on stage, I thought, what if they did it? What if they just took a sucker punch to Microsoft and they went all in on a boot camp style Linux support?

That'd be pretty great. But Apple users aren't going to care. I think it was a very common use case that if they were going to be using Linux, they'd be using it in a VM or in a terminal SSH'd into a server. They weren't putting Linux on their MacBooks. This is just something that I've always thought would be great to see Apple support. And now it's just that hope is gone. For the most end users, I think running it in a well-supported VM is actually going to be a pretty good solution for them. Unfortunately, I think when you look at the state of software distribution and development in the open source world, this is going to fit right in with where most people are at. And then something to keep in mind, there's the Docker angle here.

And that also got a mention in Apple's keynote and in the State of the Union where some of these clips are coming from. And it seems they're planning to work with Docker to bring some kind of support natively to macOS. These environments can interact due to features built into macOS Big Sur. And thanks to the hypervisor framework with complete support for networking, storage, input devices, and much more. Virtualization technology is used by container solutions such as Docker. And we know it's incredibly important for many of you, as it's very common for server-side development and testing. So we'll be working with Docker to enable this in the coming months. To Docker somehow via some probably virtualization tool like it's done on Windows. Right. Well, I mean, that's how it works now, right? Docker just spins

up a Linux VM in the background, and then the user space sort of connects everything through with proxies and forwarding. On macOS already? Yeah, yeah, that's how they do it now, because, you know, they didn't go the Windows route of having this, you know, before fancy API compatibility, and now just even more built-in things. So instead of OS X or OS 11 now doing, you know, Windows does that at the OS layer for you with WSL, and on the Mac side, that's what the fancy Docker desktop app is for. Yeah, and we're not going to see something like WSL on Macs. That's just, it's not going to happen. They are too scared of dipping their toes in the water of something that is a license that requires you to contribute back. That's never been their thing. For lack

of a better word, they're takers. They're not contributors to open source. And we're not going to see something like them bringing the Linux kernel into Mac and having it run things natively. It's just never going to happen unless there's a huge cultural shift at Cupertino. You know, that's really interesting. You were talking about the taker side. I think they kind of hit on it there. You know, they were talking about how they've already made some patches they're going to be contributing to a wide range of open source software. But right at the end, they mentioned the whole goal of that is it's just like a recognition that these software libraries are at the base of so much proprietary software and open source or mixed licensed software that their goal was to get end user software going. And so they just had to touch

these base systems. And it's an interesting model of take when you want, contribute when you need to. It's very Apple. And you think about their focus. Their focus really at the end of the day is all about iOS services, building that iOS ecosystem platform. That's really what drives them. And so you can kind of look at the lens of these decisions through that.

This is bringing the Mac platform closer together. It means that the Mac is once again kind of its own unique branch of technology like it was back when it was PowerPC or even Motorola based. I think, now I could be wrong, but I think this is tremendously wonderful for Linux on the desktop. And it's also to FreeBSD's loss. If you think about it, imagine for us, just for like a crazy branch of reality moment, let's picture that, right, FreeBSD was GPO. And then let's picture that Apple decided to adopt some of the BSD user lens stuff and bring it in with their mock kernel into Mac OS and that every single improvement they made to any of those tools or any of that

user space stuff over time had to be contributed 100% back up to free BSD. Where would free BSD be today? And I know Apple hates the GPL and they don't want to use that blah, blah, blah, even though they do have some GPL projects, actually. But I know that for their desktop and for their consumer systems, that's not what they're into. to use that, blah, blah, blah, even though they do have some cheap build projects, actually. But I know that for their desktop and for their consumer systems, that's not what they're into. But imagine that moment.

This could be FreeBSD's moment for those who want to remain on the x86 platform. This could be FreeBSD's moment, but instead it will be Linux and Windows. And I think for those who want a Unix-like system, now you have Lenovo, Dell, and System76, Entroware, and others that are at the top of their games right now making Linux hardware, top Linux hardware, the best Linux hardware we've ever seen. And it's a perfectly functional developer system that you can install

and just continue to upgrade. And you don't have all these shenanigans where once a year, they're going to pull the rug out from underneath you with either a new UI or a new platform or a new way of distributing apps or a new app store system or a new in-app payment restriction. That kind of stuff just doesn't happen. And it's just goofy nonsense that people that are creating server-side and web software just don't even need to deal with. Now, people who are writing iOS apps and Mac apps, they'll have to deal with it. But I think Apple will limit the total developer appeal by moving away from x86. Right. I mean, you know, they have done a lot to show how games and other sort of graphical utilities will run. But you've just got to wonder how many times is there some weird C library that, you know, you have to get all the right build dependencies installed for to get it to compile

just because your, you know, Python app needs to link against it so it can use those advanced features. Now, it does seem like they've already, they've been paying particular attention to that. If you look at some of the libraries, they've already chosen to port. But sometimes you get into the weeds and there just isn't an ARM build for it and you're not comfortable porting that C dependency, you might be stuck. Yeah, I think also the lack of virtualization options will hurt. When you spend $3,000, $4,000 on a computer, you want to be able to do all of the things you need it to be able to do. And that often for a lot of professional workloads or even

hobbyist workloads includes virtualization. And emulating, full stack emulating x86 on ARM, I don't care how fast your ARM processors are, that's going to be painful. And it seems like Apple sort of has built a mechanism for certain types of Mac software, and they're calling it Rosetta 2. Now, while we expect most developers will go native immediately, we want to make sure that users can run all of their apps on day one, even if some apps haven't yet been updated. Now, we've been down this road before. When we transitioned from PowerPC to Intel processors, a cornerstone of that transition was Rosetta, a technology that makes it possible to run PowerPC apps on Intel-based Macs.

macOS Big Sur will include a new version of Rosetta, Rosetta 2. Rosetta 2 automatically translates your existing Mac apps so they work on new Macs with Apple Silicon. And this time, Rosetta is even faster, more powerful, and more compatible. We will see. They say it translates the apps at launch time. And if you download the app from the Mac App Store, in the background, it will translate the calls almost Wine Proton style, where it says, okay, this is an x86 call, I'm going to translate it to an Apple Silicon call. And it will pre-cache that for certain types of apps. And then for apps that you download from the web,

they will figure it out on first launch. And so that first launch will have a delay. That's where it's really interesting because they have the ability both to like just sort of convert it ahead of time for a compiled application or for something like a web browser that's running just-in-time compiled JavaScript, then they can do it just at runtime too, which I mean, clearly that's where a lot of engineering effort, besides building the silicon, like they've spent a lot of time on Rosetta too, I'm sure. It's an interesting bit of technology.

I think part of me covers this with a bit of sadness. It would have been great to see something like Mac OS just become generally available. I would love to have to see Apple just say, yeah, you know what we're going to do is we're going to make it the most powerful developer workstation for every developer in the world like they claim it is

by making it available to everyone in the world. Right. Compete on the same terms of like, I can buy some sort of decoupled hardware, whatever I want happens to suit me best, Mac or otherwise, and then run your operating system because it's a good operating system

with a good ecosystem, which that all might be true, but I just can't run on a ThinkPad or an XPS. Yeah. And with this transition, macOS 10 is done. They're done. They ran it for about 17 years. They got about 18, 17 years of life out of it. Really, they're launching macOS 11, and that will be a new version, a new branch with a new UI, with these new features, and aim for ARM compatibility towards the future.

And I think when we look at this, we as a desktop are not yet ready to fully replace either Windows or Mac OS still. And we covered this a little bit last week. I would love to have seen our desktop environments be even a little more robust, get even a little more polished. I'd love to see a more powerful file system used by default in more distributions. I would like to see more engineering put into some of the finer touches to get developers up and running with sets of tools. Like you've seen certain distributions invest in, but it's just unique to them. Those are areas where I think like Linux

could have shored up a little bit before this opportunity came around. But here's the thing. This is, to Apple's own admittance, a two-year transition. Now, Tim Cook says they're going to start shipping ARM Macs by the end of this year, but they say it'll take them multiple years

to actually pull this off. We still have time and we still have an opportunity to see where the rest of the industry goes here. And I think Linux is in a really, really good position right now because of our early work on ARM and because of the continued acceleration of adoption of ARM in the cloud, which will benefit Linux as well. I think we're in a good position. Yeah, you're right. I mean, really, everything's been going well from Linux. Microsoft recognizes it. I mean, Apple clearly recognizes it.

Mentioning Linux at WWDC, a powerful ecosystem of easily recompilable software. That's about the best thing you could hope for, right? They had to go set up special relationships with folks like Microsoft and Adobe to make sure that their flagship products would run versus the open source approach where they just said, oh, yeah, we already fixed it. We'll send you the patches. Yeah, and it's just going to be in the OS and good. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it gives them more control. And to some extent, if they contribute some other things, it might benefit the ecosystem. I mean, just running on their platform is good. Ideally, you'd hope that they would continue to contribute some improvements and such, but they at least acknowledge they have to play a little bit of ball. So what do you think Intel's reaction will be, Byte? Well, if I look at how Intel reacted when Microsoft went with Snapdragon, it will be a lot of lawsuits coming up. Yeah, especially it seems like Microsoft got in that area when it came to the emulation

of x86. And Intel released some statement already saying, we're going to keep working with Apple on other stuff. You know, we don't just sell them CPUs, but also our CPUs are still better. They essentially released that statement. Well, I'll just say this before we wrap up. If anybody out there in the audience ends up with one of these Mac mini iPad monsters, try putting Linux on there and let us know how it goes. I'd be curious. iPad monsters, try putting Linux on there and let us know how it goes. I'd be curious. Okay, Wes Payne, before we get out of here, we do have a pick this week that is rad. It just,

first of all, is a great example of how awesome a command line application can look. And second of all, very handy. Yeah, this is so cool. It's called Unsilence, and it's a console interface in library to remove just the silent parts of a media file. Yeah, even videos or whatnot. So say you download a lecture and the professor pauses, walks back and forth and just sort of, you know, maybe there's two, three, four, five, ten seconds of silence there. Just snip all that out for you. Or sometimes Chris is burping on the live stream and you just don't want to hear it. Yeah, you do need something tuned for burps though. That is not impossible though. Right, customized.

That's what Drew's for. Drew's tuned for burps. We appreciate you. Yeah, can we develop a machine learning module for detecting burps and farts? That would make my life much easier. Well, we've got plenty of sample data, so we should be able to. Yeah, there you go. I have a link to that and everything else in the show notes.

It's such a nice app. It gives you tons of feedback as it goes through and like figures out where all the silent bits are and removes them. And, you know, there's all kinds of stuff because it's just some Python and FFmpeg. And so if you want to customize this, you want to make a video where it's a whole bunch of jump cuts really quick, or you want to make a video that just contains the silent parts, all of that's possible with this library. Everything is possible with FFmpeg, let's be honest. It's the best tool ever.

And it's already ported to run on Apple Silicon. Oh, good. All right. Well, I think that's about all the Apple talk we have in us for like the next 360 episodes. So that should be good. Unless somebody gets their hands on one of them development kits, then we might bring it up again. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. One more plug for how you get a hold of us.

The network is at Jupiter Signal. The show is at Linux Unplugged on the Twitters, if you use it. And if you don't, I understand. Just go tell a friend about the show. Spread the word about the Big Talk Show. We appreciate it. Let the world know there's an Unplugged out there for them. See you next Tuesday! Thank you. So I think, you know, the reality is, is that Macs haven't been for a long time or were never going to be computers that you could just use for whatever you want. They are a product that has that product's operating system like a Nintendo Switch does, like a PlayStation or an Xbox does.

And you've got to think about it in that context, not in a, hey, this is a piece of consumer technology that is mine and I can do what I want with. You have to think of it as this is a piece of technology that is built for very purpose specific things. And if I am doing those things, perhaps it's good for me, but I can't make it do what I want. And even though it's very expensive and if I spend $4,000 on a laptop, I should be able to do everything with it. That's just not the reality is there is a use case spectrum now.

And it just if it doesn't fit within that use case spectrum, this is not a computer for you.